INTIMATE PUBLICITIESsignificant enemy or enemies. This bespeaks a retreating political theology that, acceler-
ated by globalization and the media, no amount of inflammatory rhetoric on the part of
Cha ́vez or other spokespersons of the regime can suffice to slow down. As in the case of
the Defense Prime Minister and his panties, such forceful rhetoric and sovereign acts
seem caught in a horizontal drift in which any auratic height they seek to secure for
themselves fatefully dissipates.
To put all this in terms that slightly stretch Marin’s, yet I believe are compatible with
his, in spite of its avowedly politico-theological inclinations, the regime seems fatefully
unable to gather enough political-theological signs around itself so as to translate, not just
the destructively divisive play of forces in the present, but also its gaps, oblivions, and
lacunae into an enduring socio-political constellation. As a result, no sooner does it
quench a fire than another flares up with equal or greater intensity, a situation still rife
with laughter, even if nowadays somewhat frozen or contained by the regime’s official
spectacle of might. Thus the regime goes on, from one fire to the next, in a disconcerting
drift that, if not somehow halted (but how, given the difficulties of adopting any unabash-
edly authoritarian solutions under the current global and local preconditions?), cannot
but endanger, if not its survival, then its overall, long-term revolutionary design. No
wonder that lately the termimplosionhas repeatedly surfaced in the writings of a series of
local political analysts in reference to the regime’s current predicament. In a recent news-
paper article, one of these insightfully summarized the situation by pointing out that,
curiously enough, given how much it has overcome any overt challenges to its rule, ‘‘the
recurrent trait of this government has been its incapacity to consolidate the dominion
over institutions that were already regarded as definitively controlled.’’^64 Another way of
saying this is that, as in a dream, at least according to some indications, the more the
government assumes complete control of any particular institution or domain, the more
things slip out of its hands, any illusion of control rapidly dissolving into thin air.
I will end this postscript with an event that recently filled all the main Venezuelan
media and that I believe illustrates much of what I have been saying. This is the assassina-
tion in the streets of Caracas, on November 18, 2004, of Danilo Anderson, the state prose-
cutor in charge of bringing to trial all those accused of participating in the failed coup
attempt against Cha ́vez of April 2002. He was killed by a car-bomb, and, if one is to judge
from the government’s immediate response, it is hard to come up with any other incident
that so instantly raised local political temperatures. A series of rallies was swiftly orga-
nized, which, besides blaming the oligarchy, attempted to canonize Anderson as the first
martyr of the revolution. The government went so far as to rapidly commission a series
of busts of the young prosecutor, which were to be placed in all official institutions to
honor his memory. Such an effervescent state of affairs did not last long. Before the
official pathos had any chance to settle into anything like a collective state of grief and
rightful indignation, news started to percolate in the media that suggested an altogether
different scenario than the one the regime wished to impress on the public: namely, that,
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